Windows 10 Cannot Update Reserved Partition
August 10th, 2015Disclaimer: This is what worked for me, and it’s not guidance from Microsoft. It may not work for you. Since this involves resizing partitions, it could wipe out all of your data. You may want to create a backup first. Proceed at your own risk.Over the weekend I upgraded my machines at home to Windows 10. I had two desktops and one Surface Pro (the first one) running Windows 8.1. Since I had multiple machines to upgrade, I downloaded the Windows 10 installer to a USB flash drive using the media creation tool mentioned on.
The System Reserved Partition (SRP) may be full. The System Reserve Partition (SRP) is a small partition on your hard drive that stores boot information for Windows. Some third-party anti-virus and security apps write to the SRP, and can fill it up. I don’t assume to know how much you know about disk space, but you cannot simply clear the apparent needed space. Because it will be fragmented you need to probably clear 20 to 30 gigs of space and defrag or find some massive chunks of files to delete to give windows 10 the space that it does need.
For me, the media creation tool wouldn’t recognize the USB drive, so I chose the ISO and copied the contents to my flash drive. I used the flash drive to upgrade my Surface Pro with no issues.Then I tried to upgrade my desktops. The first one failed with the message saying, “We couldn’t update the system reserved partition.” That happened after it downloaded updates (that takes a while).
I tried my other desktop and got the same message.I pulled up diskmgmt.msc and saw that my system partition had a size of 100 MB and was essentially completely full – 3% free. Both machines were in that state. So I started searching for a solution.
I ran across a couple of places, such as this one on, that had a set of instructions to free up space. It included commands that I didn’t actually know existed (I’ve never needed takeown).I followed the instructions and had more than 50 MB free on system partition. I ran the Windows 10 upgrade, and this time it got further before failing and failed with a different message (I don’t remember exactly what it said).At this point I decided to extend the system partition.
The thread on reddit mentioned a tool called. I did a search and found a review on. They were complimentary of the pro version, so I decided to give it a try.The UI makes it to drag the OS partition to resize it a bit smaller and then extend the system reserved partition to make it bigger. I shrunk my OS partition by 200 MB and increased the system reserved partition to 300 MB.
After hitting Apply, Windows has to be rebooted for the tool to make the change. I did that and let it do its work, and then all was good. Windows 8.1 booted up just fine with the newly resized partitions.I ran the Windows 10 upgrade again, and the upgrade proceeded smoothly. Thanks to the folks at MiniTool for a great tool!Follow me at.
Microsoft is not one to waste time. Just to make sure that you have no time to waste, somebody at Microsoft evidently has the sole job to F.K UP every update possible.Yesterday I had yet another user that could no longer access one of her PCs on her LAN because the Microsoft 1703 update TURNED OFF NETWORK DISCOVERY! WTF?Now my machine keeps bugging me to install update 1703, but when I try I get the message 'We couldn’t update system reserved partition'. WTF does that even mean?Is the reserved partition corrupt? Is it too small? Can you not find it?
WTF am I supposed to do with ' We couldn’t update system reserved partition'?So I did the obligatory Google search and a plethora of supposed fixes for this pop up all the way back to 2015.Not wanting to completely screw up my system and have to rebuild from a backup, I thought I'd ask the fine folks here if any of you have seen this latest screw up with Microsoft updates and if you had found a single solution that works.Here's what I see on my system when I try and upgrade to 1703. It gets to about 25% done then pops up this error.For the sake of completeness, here is what my partitions look like on my 1TB SSD.Also, if you've seen the 'I'll just disable network discovery while I update the user's PC' problem, have you seen anything from Microsoft about that yet?
Windows 10 Cannot Update Reserved Partition Download
All I hear is radio silence on that one. Mike400 wrote:That reserved partition is too small.
The other issue I see with your partitions is that empty partition at the beginning of the disk. Windows doesn't like having a small empty partition at the very beginning of a disk. I'm actually surprised any version of Windows installed on that system.This machine started just a few months back as a clean Windows 10 Pro install. If there are partitions, Windows created them (except for the one unallocated partition I created to try and resize the reserved partition).
Zacharrywilliams wrote:Mike400 wrote:That reserved partition is too small. The other issue I see with your partitions is that empty partition at the beginning of the disk. Windows doesn't like having a small empty partition at the very beginning of a disk. I'm actually surprised any version of Windows installed on that system.Yep. This looks to me like it was done as an upgrade.
Windows 10 Cannot Update Reserved Partition Key
The fat32 partition is what leads me to that. Edit: also network discovery doesn't prevent people from accessing workstations, or shares.This was never an upgrade except for updates that Windows 10 Pro has installed.The network discovery issue does stop other devices from seeing the PC on the network. I just got off the phone with another client having issues with his networked Minolta copier not being able to send scans to his PC. Rebooted it and got the blue sidebar asking if we wanted the PC to be visible to other devices on the network (here's a pic of the notification - ).After saying yes to that screen the copier went right back to scanning to his shared folder. Dbeato wrote:Mike400 wrote:That reserved partition is too small. The other issue I see with your partitions is that empty partition at the beginning of the disk.
Windows doesn't like having a small empty partition at the very beginning of a disk. I'm actually surprised any version of Windows installed on that system.This is what I know, does your backup also fail as well?No. Acronis is working fine. I did a manual backup before beginning to mess around with the partitions last night. No issues at all.
So far, during my rebuild. Microsoft evidently does not bother to update the version downloaded with Media Creator - it installed version 1607 instead of 1703.
Windows creates different partitions based on whether or not you enter a product key. When I entered my product key during the install, Windows made a 500MB partition for system and left the rest as my C partition.
When I selected 'I don't have a product key' (because it says to do that if you are re-installing Windows), Windows gets all jiggy and creates 4 partitions as show in the images below. The glaring problem are the sizes of the partitions created by the Windows 10 1607 installer that Media Creator loads onto your USB. And why 4 partitions with no product key and only 2 with a product key?.I started by being lazy and not entering the product key at first. It wouldn't do Microsoft any good anyway, because the motherboard ethernet adapter drivers haven't been installed and there is no internet access until that is done from the Gigabyte motherboard drivers CD.When I saw the 4 partitions, I stopped the install, re-started the install, deleted the partitions and ran the install using my product key.
When I did that, no 4 partitions - just 2.Now downloading updates for the motherboard utilities and Windows 10 Pro. After the first updates, subsequent updates did not show the Creator's update (1703) as being available. Windows update just said 'Your device is up to date.' Below that message a couple of lines, the Update status settings page showed 'Good news! The Windows 10 Creators Update is on its way. Want to be one of the first to get it?' Then it shows a link - where you can go to force the download of the Creators Update.I'll give it a shot and let you know if the new 2 partition install (only accomplished if you enter the Windows product key at the time of install) helped.
I don't know if you resolved the problem. I have done the following:Downloaded MiniToolReduced the size of the c drive so the free space was next to the reserved partitionIncreased the size of the reserved partition into the free spaceClicked apply, restarted the computer and it workedThis probably took about 10-15 mins to do. I had to figure out what I was doing as got the solution from a comment on this thread'After researching all this time I finally succumbed and downloaded MiniToolPartionWizard and extended the 100MB system reserved partition an additional 150MB and oila'! Installed perfectly.I AM NOT A FAN OF HAVING TO DOWNLOAD FREEWARE TO EXTEND A PARTITION THAT SHOULD BE ABLE TO BE DONE VIA DISK MANAGEMENT OR DISKPART.'
I hope this helps.